Jonah Raskin, 2006
Posted: April 15th, 2007

I like to look at beautiful women, from afar,
like the beautiful woman I’m looking at now
cheek-bones sensual lips brown hair warm smile,
a beautiful woman and a poet, too, reading beautiful poetry, though

her beauty makes it hard to hear her words, her proud boyfriend
sitting in the seat next-to-me, the audience seemingly as amazed as I,
and now my turn to read arrives and
I stand in the place where she stood
bathing in the radiant beauty of the body left behind,
look out at audience, read my poems,
gaze from afar into her beautiful brown eyes.